DaCostaBR: Although if you want me to disagree with your opinion, well, a lot of characters do fuck up in this movie, yeah. Failure and learning from it is what the movie is about. That little muppet even has a speech about it and everything.
But... they don't learn. The veteran characters are saddled with failures that are not their own, learn absolutely nothing and step down because the actors are old and the Mouse demands that they do. For Leia to learn from her failure, she had to fail in a way examined by the narrative. Which means she had to be a domineering asshole praised and worshiped for her iconic status and ability to fundraise and recruit Rebel meat, fail, and get called out on it. Fuck me sideways for turning this into a political thread, but she had to be Hillary Clinton. She wasn't; she was everyone's nice warm personable abuela, which means everyone in the Rebel fleet was an enabling idiot, because at the end of the day the Rebels still don't have intelligence in both senses. She steps down when personal tragedy hits and someone makes a useful suggestion. Neither has anything to do with her failure as a general. Generals are people who play Logistics and Dragons, they don't have to dungeon crawl.
Pepe can go fuck the fuck off, it's clear he didn't learn anything. Learning from failure (one's own or someone else's) involves effort; especially if you failed other people (and everyone involved DID), the steps that constitute learning correspond
to the steps involved in making a good apology. Pepe on the other hand is like a Christian priest who stamps his own indulgences. "Ooh, I farted in an elevator -- forgiven. I was chief propagandist for the secret religious police of an elitist exploitative regime -- forgiven. I ate a marshmallow during lent -- forgiven."
I'm not discussing Luke in detail until the spoiler embargo is well and truly lifted, but it's really obvious he learned nothing whatsoever.
The only one who demonstrably grows as a character is Rey. Step by step, she rejects prejudice, elitism, mysticism. What's more, her succesors don't need to be taught all that -- as the final scene shows, they've already got everything figured out.
DaCostaBR: As a physicist, I do find funny how other people tend have a lot less suspension of disbelief than me in regards to movie physics.
I'm also a physicist. I make a distinction between technobabble, a failure to accurately portray mundane reality, and plot >implications. To actually care about the narrative, I need to know the consequences of events and hypothetical events, and bad movie physics get in the way of that.
For a thought experiment, pick a sport you know nothing about (I recommend baseball or cricket) and read an account of the match. The most you'll be able to get is qualifiers - "failed", "got lucky", "training paid off", "scored" and the like. But you wouldn't care and you wouldn't see why anyone does.
Technobabble is easy. The world in most of fiction is euclidean; it's very easy to relate to. Self-contained novel imaginary objects whose interactions with the world are well-documented don't annoy me in the slightest, because their interaction with the world and the consequences thereof are very clear. If someone gets impaled on a fictional lightsaber, they will most likely die, so when people vroom vroom at each other, I know what's at stake.
Problems with mundane reality are, well, problematic. The fact is every story is built on the realistic foundation, and every hypothesis builds on many more real facts than fictional constructs. The lightsaber is fictional, but what it does to the body is a mundane cauterized cut. The power of the lightsaber rides on the assumption that people die when they are killed.
However, these days I do forgive falls and thermal conductivity/convection/radiation, as well as being shot in extremities. Just please don't drown in lava, it's too dense for that.
The absolutely worst problem is plot >implications and selective ingenuity. Many plots rely on characters inventing a solution. Fictional elements need to be especially well-defined to provide space for inventions, especially because every invention is, in a way, a small dig at the audience for not having thought of the same (even though it's practically impossible during the condensed audiovisual barrage of the typical action-adventure movie). The flipside of ingenuity is heroic sacrifice; if it's pointless and useless, the movie's ability to wield the most meaninful consequence goes down the drain. In ep 8, ???'s sacrifice is initially prompted by having to ???, which is iffy - don't they have droids for that? But the tracker thing is even worse. We have two plots centered around tracking and communication that rely on these devices being bulky, expensive, and require oceans of energy. And then there's a communicator the size of an nfc token whose role in the plot is that of a massive hole and nothing else. It's not really a problem that a 3 cm antenna can transmit ftl signals across the galaxy and do triangulation and who the fuck knows what else, it's a problem
when that and Arecibo exist side by side.
